There’s a common problem that many applications run in to when executing cryptographic operations, and that’s the fact that the keys they use tend to exist within the application itself. This is problematic because there’s no protection of the keys — the keys are recoverable if you get a dump of the application memory, or you’re able to execute arbitrary code within the application. The solution to this problem is relatively straightforward — keep the keys out of the application.

In order for that to be effective you need to also move the crypto operations out of the application too. This means any attacks on the application won’t yield the keys. This is the fundamental design for services like Azure Key Vault, Amazon CloudHSM, or any other HSM service or device. In fact, even Windows subscribes to this design with CNG keys using LSASS.

I was thinking about this problem over the weekend and realized there isn’t really any good reference architecture out there that shows you how to build this design into your application. The services I mentioned earlier do great jobs at protecting secrets, but they’re kind of designed with certain applications in mind — greenfield, cloud first, or disconnected. This can make it difficult to migrate existing applications to use these services, or maybe you just can’t use them for whatever reason (regulatory, legal, etc.). On top of all that, you don’t even know how to start.

So, I did something dumb. I built a reference implementation that lets you move crypto operations out of your application and into a separate process.

This is a reference implementation. That means it’s not designed to handle production loads, and absolutely is not built to withstand attack. It’s a sample intended to show how you might offload certain operations. There are probably some horrible bugs in here and there might even be vulnerabilities.

Was that sufficiently scary enough?

The basic idea is simple. You have an application that hosts a service. The service has a set of commands available to it:

Generate key

Encrypt

Decrypt

Sign

Validate

Your application calls these commands with the necessary payloads, the service does the thing, and returns a result. The service is HTTP-based, and protected with pinned client certificates.

The crypto operations are real, backed by the jose-jwt library, but they’re ephemeral — the keys are just stored in memory. The idea is that you can inject your own implementations as you see fit, so any migrations you might undergo can be gradual and painless.

There are two classes that need to be implemented — the crypto operations class, and the storage service. You can use the built-in crypto operations class InMemoryCryptoProcessor at your own risk, but you absolutely need to implement the storage, lest you lose all the keys when the app shuts down.

Crypto Processor

Storage Service

You can modify the startup code on your own, or you can implement IStartupTransform and configure it:

Author Spotlight

Steve Syfuhs is a security software builder. He has spent the last decade building secure systems and is currently working at Microsoft as a Windows Identity Program Manager in OS Security. He was a Microsoft Developer Security MVP between 2011 - 2018.